NEWS STORY: Hundreds of thousands gather to repent, seek religious revival

c. 1997 Religion News Service WASHINGTON _ Hundreds of thousands of men gathered on the National Mall _ sometimes on bended knee, sometimes studying their Bibles _ Saturday for the Promise Keepers”Stand in the Gap”rally, creating a vast sea of Christians seeking repentance and praying for revival of church and nation.”We have so much in […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Hundreds of thousands of men gathered on the National Mall _ sometimes on bended knee, sometimes studying their Bibles _ Saturday for the Promise Keepers”Stand in the Gap”rally, creating a vast sea of Christians seeking repentance and praying for revival of church and nation.”We have so much in common, but we have not stood together,”Promise Keepers founder and former football coach Bill McCartney said before the rally _ perhaps the largest religious gathering in the history of a city known for huge demonstrations.”The church has been divided and a house divided cannot stand,”he said.

The mood of the six-hour, unabashedly Christian rally, estimated to have cost the seven-year-old evangelical men’s ministry some $9 million, moved back and forth from festive rejoicing to somber repentance, between praise and prayer as the throngs sang old hymns and contemporary Christian choruses or clasped hands in prayerful fellowship.


The”Stand in the Gap”assembly takes its name from the biblical book of Ezekial, the visionary and apocalyptic prophet whose message was directed at the Israelite exiles in Babylon:”I looked for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found none”(Ezekial 22:30, New International Version).

Those gathered for the rally were enthusiastic.”It’s changed my life, it’s changed the men’s life in my church,”said Mike Klein, 43, of Red Bluffs, Calif., a member of the Church of God (Anderson, Ind.). And 14-year-old Paul Masci, a Southern Baptist and high school freshman from Atlanta, said because of Promise Keepers”a lot of people have changed.” Joe Perry Jr. of Baltimore, carrying his 3-year-old son Joseph Micah on his shoulder, said he came to the rally”to demonstrate to my son what God not only does in my life but what he has done in others’ lives.” Randy Phillips, president of the group, mindful of the criticism that has been leveled against Promise Keepers for allegedly seeking to subjugate women, told the dense throng as the assembly got underway:”We have not come to demonstrate our power to influence men; we have come to display our spiritual poverty. … We have not come to exalt our gender as males; we have come to exalt the man Jesus Christ.”No women should feel threatened by this gathering because the ground is level at the foot of the cross,”he said.”In the kingdom there is neither male nor female.” A perfect autumn day _ sunny skies and temperatures climbing into the high 70s _ greeted the gathering of casually clad church-going men who said they were turning the stretch of public land usually peopled by tourists and bureaucrats into a Christian temple.

The mass of men so filled the Mall, stretching between the Capitol and beyond the Washington Monument and the Ellipse in front of the White House, that organizers said some 25,000 participants were caught in side streets and couldn’t get on the Mall.”This is not a march,”McCartney said in distinguishing the event from the 1995 Million Man March sponsored by the Nation of Islam.”This is a solemn assembly. … We’re coming before a holy righteous God and asking for forgiveness.” Political causes were virtually absent, except for a smattering of posters near the Washington Monument likening abortion to the atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II.

And only a handful of protesters showed up at the edge of the event. A little more than 200 demonstrators with the National Organization for Women filled a grassy corner not far from the Mall, denouncing the leaders of the movement as”wolves in sheeps’ clothing”pursuing”a right-wing agenda”in the name of the gospel and family values.

The multi-colored, multi-racial crowd represented a broad cross-section of America and was compared to the turning of the color of the leaves on the trees lining the Mall by Jack Hayford, senior pastor of the Church on the Way, Van Nuys, Calif., one of the co-emcees.”I’m proud to be an American Indian by race, but I’m more proud to be a Christian by grace,”said one man wearing a white headdress with blue-feather trim.

McCartney, in a briefing with reporters before the event, said his late afternoon speech (approximately 5 p.m. EDT) would challenge the gathered men to meet on the steps of state capitols on Jan. 1, 2000, to show evidence of having created”vibrant mens’ ministries”and to demonstrate their commitment to denominational and racial reconciliation.”I look to the year 2000 … to mark the end of racism inside the church of Jesus Christ and then it will have a dynamic impact on society,”he said.”We’re going to ask each guy to go back to his own local church and to make a stronger commitment in his own church,”McCartney said.”We’re going to try to insist that no guy go his own way.

In his weekly Saturday radio address, President Clinton took note of the gathering on the Mall. He said while”there are those who have political differences”with the organization,”no one can question the sincerity of the … men who are willing to re-assume their responsibilities to their families, and to their children, and, therefore, to our future.”Their presence here is yet another example of the nation’s understanding and attention to the need to strengthen our families,”Clinton said.


While seeking to stay clear from identifying the movement with any political agenda, McCartney acknowledged that some Christian critics were looking for proof that the movement had moved beyond changing men’s personal lives to focusing on issues of”justice.””They’re saying you’re having a pep rally and we haven’t seen enough fruit and that’s a sound criticism to some extent,”he said.

He defined justice as”to see the needs of others and respond to it.” But, he said, after the Stand in the Gap rally”you ought to start seeing more fruit. … I think you’re going to see the men of God in this nation meet those needs in an unprecedented way.” Still, officials insisted Promise Keepers harbor no political intentions.

Paul Edwards, a vice president of Promise Keepers, told an early morning TV show that the group was aimed only at men because”men are the problem and they need to fix it.” And he said the massive assembly was aimed at the church not the government, despite its being held in the nation’s seat of power.”This is a revival movement, not a reform movement,”Edwards said.”The issue is the heart.””We’re speaking primarily to the church,”he said.”It is the church that has lost its moral authority.”

Eds: Michael J. Paquette and B. Denise Hawkins contributed to this report.)

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